Poets in the Archive
CBH’s special collections are a treasure trove of inspiration. In celebration of Poetry Month, we invited eight accomplished poets to explore our archives in search of creative sparks. Delving into a range of subjects—from local wildlife and the built environment to Brooklyn’s LGBTQ+ history—each poet uncovered materials that spoke to them in unexpected ways.
Join us for an evening of readings as they share the archival discoveries that captivated them and present the original poems those findings inspired. Hosted by Special Collections and Outreach Librarian Kevina Tidwell, this event brings poetry, archives, and history into conversation. A special pop-up display featuring poetry-related treasures from the archives will also be on view.
This program takes place in CBH’s landmark Othmer Reading Room. Space is limited.
Participants
Morgan Boyle is a Pushcart nominated poet from Nebraska currently based in Queens. Her work can be found in FENCE, HAD, and Bullshit Lit, among other journals, as well as in Peach Mag’s Something Right Here anthology.
Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro is a Venezuelan-American artist, facilitator, and troublemaker. A 2025 Best of the Net nominee, their work appears in American Poetry Review, manywor(l)ds, and elsewhere, and has been featured by ONLY POEMS and Brooklyn Poets. They are a bilingual field producer at the oral history organization, StoryCorps, and LGBTQ+ Coordinator at Jewish Service for the Developmentally Disabled. Micaela Camacho-Tenreiro received a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University.
Andrew E. Colarusso is the author of Black Body Index (BookWorks UK), Hívado (Flood Editions), and his forthcoming poetry collection, Pettyg-d, arrives in 2026 from Flood Editions. He is also the owner of Taylor & Co. Books, an indie bookstore in Ditmas Park, Flatbush.
Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poems have have appeared in such periodicals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Alan Felsenthal is the author of Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and Hereafter (The Song Cave, 2024). His writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the co-editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (The Song Cave, 2013) and the editor of Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt (The Song Cave, 2023). He teaches poetry at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Photo credit Logan Fahey
Jess Greenbaum claims the prestige of a birth certificate from the county of kings. She has three books; the second, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal and her most recent, Spilled and Gone was named a best book in 2021 by the Boston Globe. She has work in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies for 2024, and is included in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Information about workshops at her website, https://poemsincommunity.org/
Laura Kolbe is a poet, physician, and medical ethicist as well as the author of the poetry collection Little Pharma (Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, University of Pittsburgh, 2021). She has recently had poetry and prose in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Harper's, LARB Quarterly, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry series and in A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown (Yale University Press). She lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
D. Nurkse is a former poet laureate of Brooklyn. His twelfth poetry collection A Country of Strangers: New And Selected Poems was published by Knopf in 2022.
Kevina Tidwell is the Special Collections and Outreach Librarian at CBH. In this role she provides reference services and teaches classes on archival research to groups ranging from primary school to college to older adults. She previously worked as an archival producer for documentary films and television. She holds an MLIS from the Pratt School of Information and a BA in American History from Arizona State University.
